The Other Side
by Tolakasa
Summary: Future. The demon muses on Winchesters and the success of its latest plans.


**The Other Side**

Sammy walks among the gravestones, seeking his favorite spot: the six small stones that mark the final resting places of his children. He does not know he's being watched; grief blinds once-keen eyes, keeps him from seeing beyond his tears and the weeds he gently pries from the earth at the base of the carved stones that are all he has to touch.

He does not understand. No one can explain it to him—not how he and his wife keep conceiving, despite three kinds of birth control and a vasectomy; or how his children keep dying, always on the same date, always before they reach their first birthday. He knows only the grief.

His life could have been so different, if not for his family. I could have given him so much.

But no. This family had to fight.

The Winchesters. No family has ever proven to be such thorns in my side. No mortals have ever fought so successfully against my plans. I might admire them, if they weren't mortals. If they were fighting some other of my kind.

Instead, they made me a laughingstock, this mechanic and his sons. I can still hear the chuckles, some days. Especially since that day, nearly twenty years ago, when the sons freed their father and injured me so badly. They succeeded in temporarily banishing me from the realm of mortals, an accomplishment no other mortal in all of human history can boast.

The fools think they killed me. John planted the seed in their heads, the notion that I _could_ be killed, with his obsession over that damned Colt. He never realized—not until it was too late—that the Colt could only kill creatures which were born, for only creatures that have beginnings may have endings. I wanted it because it could kill my children, not because it could kill me.

This John Winchester also never realized, not until it was too late. My children are as precious to me as his were to him. Unlike him, I also treasured those who came to me of love, not simply by virtue of birth. For all their airs, for all their detestation of powers they declare to be evil, mortals cannot love in the same glorious, unrestrained, unconditional ways as demons.

He never loved Sammy the way I could have. I love each of my children with everything that I am, more than any mere mortal heart ever could hold. John's attentions were split. Sammy had to share him with Dean. Had he come to me—

No child of mine ever complained of favoritism. The demonic heart can love a thousand children as fiercely as it can love one.

John and Sammy, like so many mortal fathers and sons, clashed because of their similarities. That, with the burden of grief John carried, the blame for Mary's death that he struggled so hard not to put on Sammy's shoulders, would have driven them apart. Would have made Sammy vulnerable. He would have come to me.

If it weren't for the brother.

I kill the mothers because they are the enemy. Mortals whisper to themselves that fathers love their children just as much as mothers, but the truth which they refuse to acknowledge, that they bind in ropes woven of sheer denial, is that they are, each of them, formed by their mothers. Fathers provide half a cell; it is the mother who nurtures for three-quarters of a year, who gives of her own mortal body the stuff to create a new being. Fathers are for discipline and play. The true formation of character is left to the mother.

I am powerful, but not omnipotent. How was I supposed to know that this small, terminally ordinary boy-child would turn into a mother for Sammy? That he would be the one willing to sacrifice everything to keep the family intact?

_Blessed are the peacemakers_, someone once said. This is why. Peacemakers possess power that can challenge the angels and demons alike.

Dean became a peacemaker, a substitute mother. John fancied himself a protector, but his protections were laughable. Nothing that man could have done would have kept me from Sammy. What kept Sammy from my grasp was Dean. What gave Sammy the power to injure me was no magical weapon, no thirst for vengeance, only that powerful bond with his brother.

But I am patient. I knew the day would come.

I am known for my patience. Among my kind, I am often the slowest to act—not out of some lack of conviction, but because I can see all the threads in the tapestry. My plans are complex. Schemes I hatched at the beginning of time are just now taking their first steps toward fruition. After my first failed attempt to take Sammy from the mortals who would twist him into a useless, tortured _man_, I stayed out of the mortal world for twenty of their years. Such a long separation would have killed others of my kind, the impatient young ones who cannot go a mortal week without causing mischief.

Not I. Twenty years I waited, from the time I tried to take Sammy until I found it necessary to destroy Jessica, and it was no more to me than the passage of a day to mortals. John Winchester thought there was some purpose to the waiting.

It was such a delight to explain to him that I was merely tired and taking a nap, so as to be refreshed when the time came to gather up the children of my soul. To watch his sanity slowly crumble with the realization that he had wasted twenty years, years he might have spent being a loving father to his sons. Instead he became their drill sergeant; emotionally crippled the elder, alienated the younger.

I watch the younger son, now grown into middle age, bowed by his grief. So much like his mortal father he has become, his eyes dark and tortured, the wounds in his soul too deep to heal. His spirit constantly bleeds. He has learned to hate words that bring others such joy.

His wife, too, has learned to hate them. To hate _him_. The betrayal was easy to spark. They were the children of her womb, nurtured of her body. She is no warrior, to know that the battlefield claims innocent and corrupt alike. She knows only that the children she bears dies, and she blames him. She thinks he may be a psychotic. That perhaps he has smothered each child. Morgan, after all, breathed her last in his arms, while he spent a sleepless night holding her, rocking her, keeping watch for a demon that never appeared.

Last week, she discovered that she was once again pregnant. Their seventh child. She told him, and left. She will not return, and they both know it.

Now he mourns more than his children. He kneels there mourning his marriage and the child he will never know.

I flex the fingers of the body I now inhabit. The right ring finger is bare. The amulet no longer hangs in its familiar place over his heart. It took twenty more mortal years, but Dean made his mistake. He lost too much blood in a confrontation with a witch, was unconscious when they rushed him into the ER. He could not argue when the nurses removed the jewelry.

For the first time in twenty years, he was unprotected.

It came earlier than I planned. But patience is no excuse to ignore the perfect opportunity.

I step out of the car—Dean still drives this loud, obnoxious, antique thing. It is a physical tie to the days of his childhood, before I killed his mother. He clings to it as he once held on to her hands to take his first steps, though of course he does not remember that. It is a love that he has pushed so far into his subconscious that only uninvited guests might see it.

Dean is still here, of course. I am not a gentle possessor. I do not send my hosts to a deep, black sleep, so that they can plead later they have no memory of those events. My hosts witness everything.

You should have heard him scream when I walked his body onto a plane and proceeded to crash it, just to enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of his terror.

There was a secondary reason for that, of course. One never knows when one will cross paths with one of those pesky hunters who seem able to sense the possessed just by looking at them. An exorcism is nothing but an inconvenience to me, the equivalent of an insect bite, but it will delay my plans and require the seeking of a new host.

But just in case, I have made certain that Dean Winchester will never survive an exorcism. Without my power to continually heal it, his body will fall apart, broken and burnt. When I decide to leave, he will not survive.

I follow Sammy's path across the cemetery. I revel in the smells of fresh-turned earth, of decomposition, of grass feeding greedily on nutrients released by generations of the dead. Deep inside, cut off from control of his body, Dean whimpers. He was strong, but I am stronger. I will drive him insane before I release him.

He is already halfway there.

I stand behind Sammy now. Listen to him sob. Inhale the scent of his grief, his torment, of tears on granite.

He thinks he grieves now. Wait until word comes of his brother's psychosis. That his brother has left a trail of women raped and mutilated across fifteen states.

But my vengeance will be hollow if he does not realize the truth of Dean's actions: that it is only his brother's body committing these crimes, that Dean is as helpless to stop me as he is.

For they are nothing without each other. This is what I learned, nearly too late. The Winchester brothers are bound too tightly. Once it made them strong.

"Hello, Sammy." He whirls, startled, his face filthy with tears.

I allow his brother's eyes to blaze yellow, to betray my true nature. Watch the horror fill Sammy's face. He sinks back to his knees, the tears beginning again, his emotions too strong for words.

I make Dean's face smile, an evil smile that Dean would never direct at his precious baby brother. Dean's soul bleeds. I have only three words to say to Sammy. He has lived too long as a normal man; the powers that once drew me to him have atrophied. He is nothing to me now, nothing but a man who deserves punishment for thwarting my plans. What might have been is long gone.

Three little words, and I will be gone, driving Dean's ridiculous antique car into the night, seeking another victim. Leaving Sammy to find a way to live with the knowledge that this, that _all_ of this, is his fault for believing the folly that something like me could be killed.

"He is mine."

_**the end**_


End file.
